【Description】
Unpleasant people and events are inevitable in your life. In daily interaction with others, your behavior is bound to displease someone. The more negative fate you generate, the more obstacles you add to your life.
How do you avoid building up negative fate? If you were not on good terms with someone to begin with, how do you turn things around? Find out in this video by Grandmaster JinBodhi!
【You will learn】
- Ways to avoid negative fate
- Ways to get along those who have different values
- Ways to attract positive fate
【Featured aphorisms】
- Don’t be unkind because others are evil; don’t be intolerant because others are immoral.
- To attract positive fate, you need to be compassionate with those you meet.
【Content】
We have to learn how to nurture future positive karmic connections.
Don’t Give Up on Being Good Just Because Others Are Evil
When you are already grouchy and someone makes a mistake, how do you react? For example, your colleague bought you lunch; you asked for fried rice, but he got you cold noodles. You get mad. “Are you stupid? Are you a fool? I am craving rice, but you bought noodles.” The other person would think, “I bought you food. I didn’t even ask for any money back. Yet you yelled at me.”
Even though you are close, criticism can never feel as good as praise, right? Turns out, you are busy the next day too. You asked your colleague to bring you lunch again. He correctly bought fried rice this time. He was delighted that you ate it. He then wrote in his diary, “That fool. Doesn’t he notice it tasted different? It was because I spat in it.”
Hence, I want to tell you about the process of cause and effect and karmic connection. It is very hard to put it into words. I am trying to convey on a deeper level how karmic connections are created. Don’t refrain from doing good deeds just because another does bad deeds. Always be wary of this. Don’t refrain from doing good deeds just because another does bad deeds. Don’t stop being tolerant just because so-and-so behaves cunningly.
If you stoop to his level or worse, the outcome you would get would be like the person who ate the rice. You may end up eating something that has been tampered with. This is only a made-up example. It may not have happened in real life.
If, say, by fate you have become brothers, even if there is disagreement, you can’t kill each other. You have to learn to accept your brother. If you and he are coworkers, you don’t have the right to make him quit, so what should you do? In the workplace, you are bound to work together frequently. So, what should you do? I think we should be more tolerant in our hearts.
We have to learn how to nurture future positive karmic connections. The key is to keep a kind and compassionate heart when interacting with others. Like I said earlier, you can’t misbehave just because others are behaving badly. We should not do that. We need to remain compassionate.
(Don’t refrain from doing good deeds because others do bad ones. Don’t refrain from being tolerant because others are conniving. Use compassion and tolerance to face negative karma. Do good deeds to nurture positive connections, and in turn, nurture positive outcomes.)
When we encounter negative connections, what should we do?